PAGES

Quotes

There's no particular rhyme or reason here, these are just quotes that I have liked and collected through the past few years. Every time I see a new one I like, I add it at the bottom. Every few days I'll pull out a random one and add it to the sidebar as the "Quote of the Day."

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.
~Sir William Osler, In H. Cushing, Life of Sir William Osler

The world is full of women blindsided by the unceasing demands of motherhood, still flabbergasted by how a job can be terrific and torturous.
~Anna Quindlen (1953 - )

I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. If someone wants to get a hold of me, they just say 'Mitch,' and I say 'what?' and turn my head slightly.
~Mitch Hedberg

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
~Quentin Crisp

Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on.
~Karen Elizabeth Gordon

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
~Orson Welles

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
~Jack London

It takes hundreds of nuts to hold a car together, but it takes only one of them to scatter it all over the highway.
~Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
~Christopher Morley

We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
~Will Rogers

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.
~A. A. Milne

Knowledge is power, if you know it about the right person.
~Ethel Mumford

Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.
~Blake Clark

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
~Woody Allen

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
~Clarence Darrow

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.
~Rita Mae Brown

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
~Daphne du Maurier

In the beginning there was nothing. God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light. There was still nothing, but you could see it a whole lot better.
~Ellen DeGeneres, (attributed)

The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.
~Henry Stimson

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.
~Fyodor Dostoevsky

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
~William Hazlitt

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
~Kurt Vonnegut

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
~Gore Vidal

I just need enough to tide me over until I need more.
~Bill Hoest

Are you going to come quietly, or do I have to use earplugs?
~Spike Milligan, from "The Goon Show"

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
~John Kenneth Galbraith

If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
~P. G. Wodehouse

An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.
~Bill Vaughan

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
~Gore Vidal

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
~Stephen Hawking

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
~H. L. Mencken

In a few minutes a computer can make a mistake so great that it would have taken many men many months to equal it.
~Unknown

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber

Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised.
~Marilyn Manson, I Don't Like The Media But The Media Likes Me Columbine statement

Be the change that you want to see in the world.
~Gandhi

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.
~Mickey Mouse

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
~Randall Jarrell

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
~Walt Disney

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
~John W. Gardner

The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.
~David Richerby

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
~Thomas Mann

What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
~Paul Valery

Art is science made clear.
~Jean Cocteau

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
~Woody Allen

I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.
~Herb Caen

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?
~Al Boliska

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.
~Henry J. Tillman

Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat.
~John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, 1981-1987

I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.
~Jack Benny

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
~Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing says, 'I have no idea what to get you,' quite like giant beige bath towels.
~Missbhavens, the miscellaneous mischievous misadventures of missbhavens, 05-05-07

Eat a live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
~Unknown

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
~Henry Kissinger

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.
~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs.
~German Proverb

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
~Mignon McLaughlin

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
~Fran Lebowitz

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
~Herbert Henry Asquith

I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.
~Jackie Mason

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.
~James Thurber

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
~Carl Sagan

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
~Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.
~W. C. Fields

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
~Peter Drucker

A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top .
~Unknown

I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses.
~Victor Hugo

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
~Edward Gibbon

Adventure is just bad planning.
~Roald Amundsen

It is always the best policy to speak the truth--unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
~Jerome K. Jerome

Orthodox medicine has not found an answer to your complaint. However, luckily for you, I happen to be a quack.
~Richter cartoon caption

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
~Frank Zappa

I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known.
~Walt Disney

There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, 'Well, here I am!' and those who come in and say, 'Ah, there you are.'
~Frederick L Collins

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
~Rita Rudner

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
~William Wrigley Jr.

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
~John Sladek

The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.
~Jean Kerr

Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
~Mickey Rooney

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
~Mark Twain

Red meat is NOT bad for you. Now blue-green meat, THAT'S bad for you!
~Tommy Smothers

The best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter-he's got to just know.
~Will Rogers

I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down.
~Mitch Hedberg

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.
~Johann von Neumann

When I was a kid my parents moved a lot, but I always found them.
~Rodney Dangerfield

If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
~Edith Wharton

The cat could very well be man's best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.
~Doug Larson

The world is round; it has no point.
~Adrienne E. Gusoff

I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time.
~Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in "Peanuts"

Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.
~Jonathan Winters

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
~Jeannette Rankin

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
~Bernard Berenson

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
~Marston Bates

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.
~Al Franken, "Oh, the Things I Know", 2002

No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.
~Michael Pritchard

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
~Charles Lamb

The worst thing about Europe is that you can't go out in the middle of the night and get a Slurpee.
~Tellis Frank

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?
~George Price

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
~Clarence Darrow

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.
~Steven Wright

All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
~Harry S Truman, Letter to his sister, Nov. 14, 1947

I hate the outdoors. To me the outdoors is where the car is.
~Will Durst

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
~Samuel Johnson

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
~Dave Barry

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
~Sydney Smith

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
~Otto von Bismarck

Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.
~Steven Wright

We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
~W. H. Auden

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
~Jewish Proverb

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
~Soren Kierkegaard

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
~Charles Wadsworth

When Solomon said there was a time and a place for everything he had not encountered the problem of parking his automobile.
~Bob Edwards

If you stay in Beverly Hills too long you become a Mercedes.
~Robert Redford

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
~Abraham Lincoln

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
~Arthur Schopenhauer

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
~G. K. Chesterton

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
~George Bernard Shaw, "The Apple Cart" (1930), act I

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
~Honore de Balzac

He's the kind of a guy who lights up a room just by flicking a switch.
~Unknown

Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.
~Cullen Hightower

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
~Eugene McCarthy

When someone tells you something defies description, you can be pretty sure he's going to have a go at it anyway.
~Clyde B. Aster

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were.
~John F. Kennedy

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
~George Bernard Shaw

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
~Thomas Fuller

There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
~Doctor Who

About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
~Herbert Hoover

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
~Oscar Levant

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
~Voltaire, Discours en vers sur l'homme, 1737

The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a tired feeling.
~Paula Poundstone

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
~Johnny Carson

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
~Wilson Mizner

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
~Mark Twain

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.
~Robert Frost

It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.
~George Burns

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover.
~Mark Twain

Few things are more satisfying than seeing your own children have teenagers of their own.
~Doug Larson

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
~Thomas A. Edison

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
~Ben Hecht

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
~Dorothy Nevill

Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?
~Edgar Bergen, (Charlie McCarthy)

The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
~Jean Giraudoux

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
~Leo J. Burke

Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
~Woody Allen

Dance like it hurts,
Love like you need money,
Work when people are watching.
~Scott Adams, The Way of the Weasel

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars.
~Fred Allen

I do not know which makes a man more conservative, to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
~John Maynard Keynes, The End of Laissez-faire (1926) Ch. 1

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
~Michael Crichton, State of Fear

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.
~Franklin P. Jones

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.
~Bruce Grocott

When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.
~Al Franken, "Oh, the Things I Know", 2002

Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
~Nora Ephron

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
~Patrick Young

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
~Solomon Short

If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
~Vince Lombardi

There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.
~Peter De Vries

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
~Harry S Truman

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
~E. B. White

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
~Kurt Vonnegut, "Cold Turkey", In These Times, May 10, 2004

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?"
Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
~Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown in "Peanuts"

Life is a zoo in a jungle.
~Peter De Vries

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
~Thomas Jefferson, (attributed)

Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
~Alfred Hitchcock

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
~Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.
~Kin Hubbard

Living in a vacuum sucks.
~Adrienne E. Gusoff

Setting a good example for children takes all the fun out of middle age.
~William Feather

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
~Ogden Nash

Reality is something you rise above.
~Liza Minnelli

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
~James M. Barrie

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
~Samuel Butler

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
~Abraham Lincoln

The reason lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn't there the second time.
~Willie Tyler

In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.
~John C. Dvorak

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.
~Benjamin Disraeli

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
~Arnold Toynbee

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.
~Faith Whittlesey

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
~Sir Winston Churchill

If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.
~Johnny Carson

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
~Hunter S. Thompson

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
~Evan Esar

The reason there is so little crime in Germany is that it's against the law.
~Alex Levin

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
~Albert Schweitzer

It's never just a game when you're winning.
~George Carlin

Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
~Harrison Ford, as Indiana Jones

Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together....
~Carl Zwanzig

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
~Kurt Vonnegut

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.
~Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive

I don't understand the sizes anymore. There's a size zero, which I didn't even know that they had. It must stand for: 'Ohhh my God, you're thin.'
~Ellen DeGeneres

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
~George Carlin

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
~Alice James

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.
~Rick Polito, Marin Independent Journal's TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz"

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
~Al Capone

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
~Thomas Szasz, "The Second Sin"

Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.
~George Carlin

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
~Ogden Nash

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
~Henry Kissinger

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
~Wendell Johnson

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
~H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
~Richard Feynman

Some things have to be believed to be seen.
~Ralph Hodgson, on ESP

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
~Buck Henry

Don¹t fail to do SOMETHING just because you can¹t do EVERYTHING!
~Bob Pierce, World Vision

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
~Albert Camus

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
~Sir Barnett Cocks

Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.
~Magaret Mitchell

Ihope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.
~Herbert Rappaport

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
~Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Suffed deer heads on walls are bad enough, but it's worse when they are wearing dark glasses and have streamers in their antlers because then you know they were enjoying themselves at a party when they were shot.
~Ellen DeGeneres

The two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a big fat white guy who is threatened by change.
~Seth MacFarlane, The Family Guy

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought:
What the hell good would that do?
~Ronnie Shakes

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
~Brendan Behan

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
~Bill Vaughan

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.
~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
~George Orwell

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
~W. Somerset Maugham

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
~Elizabeth Taylor

With a stop light, green means 'go' and yellow means 'slow down'. With a banana, however, it is quite the opposite. Yellow means 'go', green means 'whoa, slow down', and red means 'where the heck did you get that banana?'
~Mitch Hedberg

I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
~E. V. Lucas

A signature always reveals a man's character - and sometimes even his name.
~Evan Esar

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
~Thomas Berger

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
~Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1938) "Vendredi"

"A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase."
~Unknown

"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."
~Doug Larson

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
~George Dennison Prentice

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
~Doug Larson

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
~Sir Richard Steele

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.
~Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, Oct. 26, 1939

A magician pulls rabbits out of hats. An experimental psychologist pulls habits out of rats.
~Anonymous

“One of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.”
~Proverb

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires”
~Marcelene Cox

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
~Orson Welles

If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.
~Paul Beatty

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.
~Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote.
~Emo Phillips

The shortest distance between two points is under construction.
~Noelie Altito

Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?
~Jay Leno

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.
~Douglas Adams

The first time I see a jogger smiling, I'll consider it.
~Joan Rivers

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.
~Fran Lebowitz

Once you have been where we parents of mentally ill/autistic children have been, you are forever isolated from most of the rest of humanity. They have never felt what you feel everyday, and you will never again feel what they feel.
~Michael Scofield, "Jani's Journey"

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
~Sir Frederick G. Banting

We have so much time, and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it.
~Roald Dahl, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.
~G. K. Chesterton

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Reading and Writing"

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
~William James

I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar on my shelf.
~Robert Bloch

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.
~Oscar Levant

Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
~Italian Proverb

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.
~Harry S Truman, in Observer, April 13, 1958

A man sentenced to death obtained a reprive by assuring the king he would teach his majesty's horse to fly within a year - on the condition that, if he didn't succeed, he would be put to death at the end of the year.
"Within a year," the man explained, "the king may die, or I may die, or the horse may die. Furthermore, in a year, who knows? Maybe the horse will learn to fly."
My philosophy is like that man's. I take the long-range view.
~Bernard M. Baruch

As he knew not what to say, he swore.
~Lord Byron

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
~George Bernard Shaw

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim".
~Lyndon B. Johnson

At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid.
~Friedrich Nietzsche

Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car.
~Evan Davis

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
~G. K. Chesterton

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
~Charlotte Whitton, Canada Month, June 1963

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
~Jerome K. Jerome

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
~Abraham Maslow

Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.
~Martin Luther

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.
~Ronald Reagan, Said during a radio microphone test, 1984

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead.
~Robert Brault

People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness.
~Heather Armstrong, Dooce, 07-07-06

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
~Marcus Tullius Cicero

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
~Arthur Schopenhauer

A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation.
~Donald Trump

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. ~Stephen King, "Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes", 1988

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
~Elvis Costello, Interview in Musician magazine, October 1983

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
~Jef Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.
~Dr. Martin Henry Fischer

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.
~Dr. Seuss

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
~Mae West

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
~Oscar Wilde

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
~Marilyn Monroe

If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.
~ J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
~Robert A. Heinlein

It's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.
~Jerry Seinfeld

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
~Frank Tibolt

First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe.
~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

For every disability there is some corresponding gift, if only you can find it.
~John Robison

If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas: learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.
~Gerald R. Ford, U. S. President

Dorothy: Weren't you frightened? Wizard of Oz: Frightened? Child, you're talking to a man who's laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe... I was petrified.

Cowardly Lion: Courage! What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot? What have they got that I ain't got? Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman: Courage!

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.
~Mark Russell

The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
~Robert Frost

The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
~Unknown

It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.
~Woody Allen

There are more experiences in life than you'd think for which there are no words.
~Anita Shreve

You know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.
~Michael Cricton, "State of Fear"

And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing sometihng else, plan to run an errand but never get there....And at the end of your life, your whole existence has the same haphazzard quality. too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.
~Michael Cricton

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
~Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
~Putt's Law

Anyone can give up, it's the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that's true strength.
~Christopher Reeves

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks!
~Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, Animal Crossing: Wild World, 2005

If God had really intended men to fly, he'd make it easier to get to the airport.
~George Winters

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
~Douglas Adams

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.
~Thomas Merton

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have not lost my mind - it's backed up on disk somewhere.
~Unknown

"If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think; but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. i'll always be with you" ~Winnie the Pooh

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
~Robert Brault

Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.
~Thomas Carlyle

Courage is being scared to death - and saddling up anyway!
~John Wayne

Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.
~Dalai Lama

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
~Will Rogers, Illiterate Digest (1924), "Breaking into the Writing Game"

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
~William Faulkner

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
~Carl Sagan

In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods. They have not forgotten this.
~Terry Pratchett

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.
~Alice Thomas Ellis

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
~Hubert H. Humphrey

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
~Fred Allen

Boxing is just show business with blood.
~Frank Bruno

It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.
~Steve Jobs

A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
~Bob Edwards

Doing nothing is very hard to do ... you never know when you're finished.
~Leslie Nielsen

I think the world is run by 'C' students.
~Al McGuire

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
~Jerry Seinfeld

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
~Yogi Berra

Hang with people who make you feel good. Who don’t judge. Special-needs
parenting is not a contest. You and your kids do the best you can.
~Amy Baskin

That's the funny thing about havin' a kid. They come with their own set of problems; make everything else you were worried about seem kinda silly.
~Greg Garcia, Raising Hope, Dead Tooth, 09-28-10

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
~David Friedman

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
~Ogden's Law

People who claim they don't let little things bother them have never slept in a room with a single mosquito.
~Unknown

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet. When toast is dropped, it always lands butter-side-down. I propose to strap buttered toast to the back of a cat, butter facing up. The two will hover, spinning, inches above the ground. With a giant buttered-toast/cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
~Omni

It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are in a hurry.
~Ralph's Observation

Don't wear ear muffs in a land of rattlesnakes

The man who invented the eraser had the human race pretty well sized up.

~Van Roy's Laws

An effective way to deal with predators is to taste terrible.
~Unknown

“Autists are the ultimate square pegs, and the problem with pounding a square peg into a round hole is not that the hammering is hard work. It's that you're destroying the peg.”
~Paul Collins

I can't complain, but sometimes I still do.
~Joe Walsh

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
~Douglas Adams

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?”
~Nora Ephron

I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.
~Beryl Pfizer

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
~Will Durant

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
~Robert Heinlein

What chance has made yours, is not really yours.
~Lucilius

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not.
~Unknown

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
~Albert Einstein

Never laugh at live dragons.
~J.R.R. Tolkien

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
~China Mieville

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
~Mark Twain

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
~Lewis Thomas

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Moral indigational is jealousy with a halo.
~H.G. Wells

Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.
~Desmond Tutu

‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
~Voltaire

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
~William Arthur Ward

It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.
~Ann Patchett

It isn't what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.
~Dale Carnegie

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
~C.S. Lewis

Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.~Haruki Murakami

Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are.~Lloyd AlexanderThis was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.~Julian BarnesBegin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.~Lewis Carroll

A loser says that's the way it's always been done. A winner says there ought to be a better way.
~Sydney J. Harris

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
~Sylvia Plath

It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
~Henry Ford

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true.~Richard Bach

One-half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.~Sidney Howard The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, an it is a jolly, kind companion.~Thackeray 'Vanity Fair'

You can't keep blaming yourself. Just blame yourself once, and move on.~Homer SimpsonIt is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done.~ Charles Dickens

Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.~Andy Warhol

Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes
back.
~Sharon Olds

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it's usually long
after the real decision was actually made--like light we see emitted from
stars.
~Richard Ford

Things happen when people are not where they
belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle.
~Richard
Ford

Just exactly what that good life was--the one I expected--I
cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only
that much has come in between.
~Richard Ford

I live for coincidences. They briefly give to me the illusion or the hope that
there's a pattern to my life, and if there's a pattern, then maybe I'm moving
toward some kind of destiny where it's all explained.
~Jonathan Ames

Human beings want to know too much about each other, and that's why there are so
many lies.
~Pete Hamill

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.
~Paula
Fox

Resolve to be a master of change rather than a victim of change.
~Brian Tracy

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.
~Napoleon Hill

Speak well of others, not of their faults.
~Buddha

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
~Paulo Coelho

As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.
~Will Shortz

I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.
~Julia Child

We can only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise if you have waited in the darkness.
~unknown

Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
~Michael Chabon

Love can make even nice people do awful things.
~Jude Deveraux

Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.
~Anne Bradstreet

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.
~Annie Proulx

I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.
~Emily Bronte

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
~Zelda Fitzgerald

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.
~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.
~ Anne Rice

Cats are connoisseurs of comfort.
~ James Herriot

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.
~Bill Nye

What a pity every child couldn't learn to read under a willow tree...
~Elizabeth George Speare

The past is always tense, the future perfect.
~Zadie Smith

I was wise enough never to grow up, while fooling people into believing I had.~Margaret Mead

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.~Norman Maclean

The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow.~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.~Ashleigh Brilliant

Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.~George Saunders

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.~James Thurber

It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
~Anne Brontë

Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.
~Haruki Murakami

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
~Stephen Hawking

We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
~Sinclair Lewis

It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.
~W.C. Fields

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
~J.M. Coetzee

And the rest is rust and stardust.
~Vladimir Nabokov

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
~Maya Angelou

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.
~Abraham Lincoln

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
~Anita Desai

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.
~Charlotte Perkins Gilman

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
~Mark Twain

The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.
~Gloria Naylor

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

~Ray Bradbury

Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...

~Eileen Chang

Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave, and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.
~Alice Childress

A party without cake is just a meeting.~Julia Child

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.

Stephen Hawking

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.

Isaac Asimov

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?

George Eliot

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.

Steven Spielberg

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Penelope Fitzgerald

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Noël Coward

Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open.

Rose Wilder Lane

Life is too short to be lived badly.

Marjane Satrapi

That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

James Jones

The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.

Henry Green

You might as well answer the door, my child,the truth is furiously knocking.~Lucille Clifton